Entries tagged with:
Augmentation

Annalee Newitz at io9.com asked me to contribute something to their "Posthumanity Week" series, and -- despite being in the middle of a conference a couple thousand miles from home -- agreed. My piece went live today under the title...

Image by Anastasia Vasilakis for The Atlantic Big Media #2, my Atlantic Monthly article, hit the web today: Get Smarter (or "Get Smart" in the print edition). Our present century may not be quite as perilous for the human...

My latest Fast Company column is now up: "Should Creative Workers Use Cognitive-Enhancing Drugs?" (originally entitled "Me++"). We may face a choice between altering our brain chemistries and falling behind in the global economy. And with that altered brain...

Participatory Panopticon edition! I've been pounded with work, and haven't been keeping up with my bloggy duties. Here are some of the issues I've been following:  Sigh, Eyeborg: Yeah, "eyeborg" -- a guy in the UK Canada (thanks @clothbot)...

Quick hits:  Cybermermaid: Nadya Vessey lost the lower parts of her legs, so she decided to become a mermaid. Much to her surprise, New Zealand special effects group Weta agreed to help her out. After seeing Ms Vessey test...

Because "Bottomsight" just sounds too naughty.  Hot Cyborg Action: Industrial designer Hans Alexander Huseklepp wondered what would happen if you took the modern design aesthetic seen in simple prosthetics like eyeglasses, and applied it to more sophisticated prosthetics, like...

A diverse assortment of legal, bioscience, psychology, and ethics academics argue in the pages of Nature for ...a presumption that mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs. ...an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of...

The Singularity concept remains inescapable these days, although rarely well-understood. Both are unfortunate developments, for essentially the same reason: the popularity of the term "Singularity" has undermined its narrative value. Its use in a discussion is almost guaranteed to become...

Discussions of the implications of the augmentation of our biological bodies with prosthetic technologies can be found quite readily in the esoteric discourses of self-described transhumanists, social theorists, and bioethicists. One might be forgiven for imagining that it's less-common among...

My colleague at the Institute for the Future, David Pescovitz, stuck my face on BoingBoing in the link to the Accidental Cyborg article (yikes!), but told me about this terrific sticker made for Gareth Branwyn's hip replacement....

Let me tell you, being a cyborg isn't all it's cracked up to be. But it might be, sooner than you expect. The popular image of a "cyborg" may be mash-up the character from Teen Titans and the Six Million...

I'm more-or-less done now with my part of the report for the Metaverse Roadmap Project. Jerry Paffendorf and John Smart each wrote parts of the overall document, but my (very large) chunk is the set of scenarios describing four different...

Can we survive the multitasking era? Okay, multitasking is hardly up there with global warming, pandemic disease and asteroid strikes as a civilization threat, but it's becoming increasingly clear that multitasking reduces overall effectiveness and accuracy. Yet we're forced to...

How'd you like a computer in your head? Brain implants are staples of both science fiction and speculative conversations about the future. I noted a few months ago that a surprisingly large portion of the Metaverse Roadmap crowd considered brain...